My file server appeared to have some filesystem issues. I wanted to check and repair the filesystem but I couldn’t find my system rescue CD on a USB stick. I considered rebooting the machine 30 times to force a check but that didn’t seem like a fun way to spend my time. The filesystem is the root filesystem and it is xfs which meant that I couldn’t use `tune2fs` to set the property to force a fsck.

Today I learned of a very easy way to force a file system check. That is to create a file /forcefsck. The startup scripts in the initial ramdisk will check the filesystem and remove the file.